The efforts of Charles V (1500–58) to consolidate and defend his hereditary possessions gave a powerful boost to the development of public credit in western Europe. To meet a scale of expenditure which surpassed anything seen before, Imperial agents had recourse to an entirely new series of financial devices, necessity providing, as it normally did, the spur to invention. Charles V's servants exploited the facilities of the Antwerp Bourse to encourage the investing public to sink its money into government debt rather than commercial enterprises or speculations in commodities. Additional funds were raised on the credit-worthiness of provincial taxgatherers in the Low Countries. Thanks to the ingenuity of his financial advisers, the emperor survived the dramatic collapse of his position in Germany during the spring of 1552; and he was able shortly after to attempt the recovery of the Imperial bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which the Lutheran princes had bartered away in their bid for French support.

Kevin Sharpe has recently offered a new interpretation of English politics and government in the 1630s in which he seeks to assess the events of the decade as they might have seemed to contemporaries, rather than to use them as a vehicle to explain the events of the Long Parliament and the subsequent outbreak of civil war. Without questioning the validity of such an exercise, it may none the less be observed that the picture of the 1630s which results does raise the question of how the mood of the Long Parliament in its early stages is to be explained. Sharpe characterizes the 1630s as a period of ‘calm and peace’ in which, though tensions and grievances existed, in particular as a consequence of Charles's religious policies, they ‘neither stymied government nor threatened revolt’. If politics and government operated so smoothly during the 1630s, why were such extensive and radical demands for reform in church and state put forward when the Long Parliament met in November 1640? Was the critical attitude of so many members of the political nation in that November merely the product of short-term factors, such as Charles's use of force to impose a new prayer book in Scotland, or even of political opportunism, or was it a reflexion of grievances which had earlier lain beneath the political surface? This paper seeks to investigate the question of how far the attitude of 1640 was rooted in the experiences of the previous decade in one particular aspect: the career of Sir Edward Dering, with special reference to his position with regard to religion and the church. Dering's career is an appropriate object for a study of this kind because it is illuminated by an unusual variety of sources; this makes it possible to compare Dering's political actions with his ideological position as implied by documents which remained private. Apart from the well-known published Long Parliament speeches and a substantial collection of family papers (embracing both correspondence and documents arising from the offices which Dering held) and apart from the evidence of Dering's antiquarian and historical interests, there survive two published works of polemical theology (together with partial drafts for others), and a number of personal memorandum books.

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, the ‘devil of a country’ to which Dr Alexander Johnston referred, seems an unlikely candidate, at the historian's first glance, for consternation. Today's visitor would find that the ‘Garden Parish’, St Ann's, truly exudes everything warm and wonderful associated with tropical stereotypes. Yet two hundred years ago Dr Alexander Johnston, ‘Practitioner of Physick and Chiurgery’ rarely observed this very paradise, the foothills of coastal St Ann's, in a positive light. To this particular Scot, the bright reds and greens clearly took second place to the shabby problems of daily life in the Caribbean.

Modern history, introduced to Oxford in the 1850s, was a subject that was hardly ‘modern’. The governing bodies of the university, as well as its teachers, intended history to strengthen and perpetuate the traditional values of liberal education. Beginning with the fall of Rome and concluding in the eighteenth century, history was not an innovative or experimental study of recent, let alone contemporary, issues and events. Instead, the study of history began and continued as an epic illustration of the qualities required of England's governing elite. Within a rapidly changing society that found the future more compelling than the past, modern history organized history, politics, economics and law as testaments to the enduring qualities of individual character and national institutions. All the liberal disciplines at Oxford, as well as those at Cambridge and subsequently at the new civic universities, reflected a national consensus about moral progress and social order which was reinforced by the content of those disciplines. The general frame of mind and expectations could not be attributed uniquely to Oxford. But there can be little doubt about the powerful influence Oxford exercized upon those graduates who left the university to assume careers of considerable national importance. It may be argued that among the various disciplines, none made so earnest and sustained an attempt to produce the right kind of men, fit for any undertaking, as did the Honours School in Modern History.

The historiography of leisure has made considerable advances since the pioneering years of the early 1970s. Research into Victorian leisure has shown that some of the ruling elite attempted to fashion the life-style of working people in order to create a disciplined and reliable labour force which suited the needs of a maturing industrial and urban society, although it must be added that sections of the British public remained immune to attempts at moral reform and improvement. Professional labour leaders were also eager to control and regulate the amusements of the poor. According to trade union bosses like John Doherty, only a sober, industrious and thrifty working class could hope to achieve progressive reforms and some form of political and economic emancipation: workers who were intemperate would apparently stifle the opportunities and aspirations of the emerging Labour movement. Nowhere is this more true than in the Labour leadership's perception of and policy towards working-class drinking.

This article sets out to examine the relationship between party politics and social reform in the Second World War. The issue of government policy towards reform was raised initially by Richard Titmuss, who argued in his official history of social policy that the experience of total war and the arrival of Churchill's coalition in 1940 led to a fundamentally new attitude on welfare issues. The exposure of widespread social deprivation, Titmuss claimed, made central government fully conscious for the first time of the need for reconstruction; the reforms subsequently proposed or enacted by the coalition were therefore an important prelude to the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ by the post-war Labour administration. These claims have not been borne out by more recent studies of individual wartime policies, but as a general guide to social reform in the period the ideas of Richard Titmuss have never been entirely displaced. In fact the significance of wartime policy, and its close relationship with post-war reform, has been reaffirmed in the most comprehensive study of British politics during the war – Paul Addison's The road to 1945. For Addison, the influence of Labour ministers in the coalition made the government the most radical since Asquith's Liberal administration in the Edwardian period. The war, he notes, clearly placed on the agenda the major items of the post-war welfare state: social security for all, a national health service, full employment policies, improved education and housing, and a new system, of family allowances.

The Central African Federation (1953–63) was the most controversial large-scale imperial exercise in constructive state-building ever undertaken by the British government. It appears now as a quite extraordinary mistake, an aberration of history (‘like the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem’), a deviation from the inevitable historical trend of decolonization. Paradoxically, one of its principal architects, Andrew Cohen (head of the African department of the colonial office) is also credited with having set the course for planned African decolonization as a whole. There have already been several attempts to explain how an error so interesting and surprising, so large and portentous, came to be made. No one, however, has yet presented an analysis based on British government archives, and the authoritative evidence that they alone can provide.